The Blue Screen of Debt |
I love Mac OS X. Honest. It's gorgeous, it's reliable, it's got most of what I like about UNIX under the hood, and an actual consistent user interface on top. Not the best GUI I've used, but consistency is more important than being 100%. But dang, that purdy GUI chews up the CPU. That's why I call the Mac OS X login screen the 'Blue Screen of Debt', in honor of what it does to your Visa balance if you want a Mac fast enough to avoid Quartz Lag. But, you say, I don't see any Lag on mine! OK, let's take this quick quiz... |
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But, I hear, 'Modern operating system', 'It's not that bad', 'You can't expect...' Yeh, I do expect better performance than that. I get less lag with Windows 2000 on a Pentium-not-even-MMX-133 laptop.
And it's not the OS: I've got a NeXTStation Mono here. It's got a 68040 at 25 MHz and 32M RAM. It's almost exactly equivalent to a Performa 475 in CPU and RAM, though it's got a better SCSI controller and video... but it's definitely slower than *any* Powermac, all the way back to a 61xx. It's running pretty much the same OS, except it's using Display Postscript instead of Quartz. 1 - A (in fact I can't recall EVER seeing delay before bringing up a menu before, all the way back to the original Mac 128),
But the GUI is in general much faster and more responsive than on my G3/400. You can avoid Quartz Lag, sure. It just takes money. Embrace the Blue Screen of Debt. |
IO |
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